


cut me open and i still bleed red

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: the odds were never in our favor [1]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Death, Dark, Five's still a terrifying little shit, Manipulation, Mentors, Murder, POV Ben, Prostitution, Substance Abuse, and Ben's still so gentle, and Klaus is still well Klaus, but pretty damn close, not the weirdest AU I've done, the hargreeves siblings are mentors in the hunger games, they are all former victors, trust me this works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 12:15:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18073241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: Ben knows his fellow mentors pretty well, for how long he's spent here, behind the screens of the Games, watching as his tributes die.Allison, from District One, has a way with the sponsors. Just a word placed here or there, stealthily dropped into conversation, and she can get her tributes the shit they need.In his time as a Mentor, Klaus has developed a habit of drinking to get through the Games, and through the rest of his life, really- anything to avoid the truth of what's happening, the ghosts of the children he and Ben have sent to their deaths.Very few people remember what Five’s name was before the Games. Caesar Flickerman and the Gamemakers nicknamed him that when he took out the entire Career Pack on his second day in the Arena.Vanya’s the newest Mentor, the victor of the Seventy-Third Hunger Games.Diego’s one of Ben’s oldest not-quite friends. A Victor from District Ten, he’d gone into the Games knowing how to kill an animal.All the other Mentors Ben knows try never to get attached. Luther, on the other hand, doesn't forget a single name.(A story of seven victors of the Hunger Games and the lives they live as Mentors.)





	cut me open and i still bleed red

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/gifts), [lorata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Twenty-Four Victors, Twenty-Four Tributes: Meet Your Quarter Quell Contestants](https://archiveofourown.org/works/813477) by [aimmyarrowshigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh). 



> Title is from "Red" by Beth Crowley.
> 
>  
> 
> To mayfriend, who I found a glorious number of Hunger Games fics by reading a few of her bookmarks, and lorata, whose writings on Victors and other general Hunger Games fics really inspired me.

_When is a monster not a monster?_

_Oh, when you love it._

_Oh, when you are the reason it has become so mangled._

**-Caitlyn Siehl**

 

Ben knows his fellow mentors pretty well, for how long he's spent here, behind the screens of the Games, watching as his tributes die.

-

Allison, from District One, has a way with the sponsors. Just a word placed here or there, stealthily dropped into conversation, and she can get her tributes the shit they need. 

That’s how she won her games, too, honestly- she formed alliance after alliance, with each tribute dying by “accident” until the one she literally stabbed in the back that landed her in the Final Five. She’d gone on to kill three of the final Five, a winning smile on her face as she did so.

She knows how to make fabrics look good, how to make people look good, how to manipulate people the way she wants. She has an eye for shine that does her major advantages in Mentoring for the Games. Ben knows that she helps out her District’s stylists, and that the Capitol permits it because Allison’s a genius at showmanship. She nets her tributes a greater number of sponsors than any other Mentor does.

But she's not some Capitolite stylist or escort, corrupt and uncaring. Allison knows what it's like to live in the Districts, even one as wealthy as One. She went through the selection process, fought her way into the Arena, but she knows starvation. She knows what it's like to be paraded about as a warning to the other Districts. She knows what it's like to never know the end, to always be terrified of what will happen if she fucks up.

Ben knows that she has a daughter, somewhere back in One, that they are using as leverage. She's the only one of the Ben or his six not-quite friends that has a chilld, and for good reason- the more family you have, the more people you care about, the more sway the capitol has over you.

-

Ben and Klaus are from the same district, with eleven years between their wins.

Ben remembers mentoring Klaus through his Games and realizing that the kid was scarily good at stalking, sneaking, and thievery, and that though Klaus didn't like violence, he had no qualms about doing nearly anything possible to seduce his way into surviving. An orphan who had worked in the textile mills since age seven, Klaus had absolutely nothing to lose in the Hunger Games.

Ben remembers thinking, for the first and last time,  _maybe we have a chance this year. Maybe I can make this happen._

And they did- the Sixty-Ninth Games had ended up taking place in an arena made entirely of a giant cave with hundreds of tunnels, with nine-tenths of the tunnels full of ravenous mutts and the other tenth full of actually edible food.

Klaus, who had known how to sneak around through in the night, who had been stealing for ages, who knew silence better than he'd ever known a family, had stayed within a shallow side cave during the day and had only moved when the fake lights had gone off. He'd stolen food from other tributes' camps while they were asleep, and had basically waited it out until nearly every tribute had been killed off by mutts.

Then, in his time as a Mentor, Klaus has developed a habit of drinking to get through the Games, and through the rest of his life, really- anything to avoid the truth of what's happening, the ghosts of the children he and Ben have sent to their deaths. 

But then Klaus gets sober for a year, from the Seventy-Second Hunger Games to the Seventy-Third, and he's often accompanied to the Victor's Village by a man named Dave, who's a year younger and works in the textile mills. Ben rarely sees Klaus without a smile on his face. Klaus falls in love, and Ben hopes against hope that it’ll last. Some one among their cursed lot deserves a happy ending, after all.

(Ben should have known it couldn't have lasted. They're from District Eight, the most rebellious District, the District where no one ever gets to be happy.)

Dave dies in a warehouse accident, and Klaus doesn't just slide back into Morphling and alcohol- he dives headfirst back in. Klaus goes back to being the Capitol’s plaything, drowning in drugs and alcohol, and Ben starts to try and figure out a way to get Klaus out of there.

At the next tribute parade, Ben can see President Reginald Hargreeves sitting on his balcony, smiling his shark’s smile at Klaus, and Ben  _knows._ He knows that the President can't let any of the Victors be happy. He has to see them suffer, to show the Victors that not even the strongest of them are anything close to his power. The Victors aren't winners- they're just survivors living with the guilt and trauma of what they did to escape that Arena.

But Klaus, who is fucking his way through Capitolites to get drugs and money for District Eight's doomed tributes- he's still in the Arena. He's never gonna escape the Capitol.

(None of them are.)

-

Five’s only fifteen, and he won his Games three years ago, at age twelve. He’s the only tribute since the Thirty-Eighth Games to do so at such a young age, and the last twelve-year-old's victory was a fluke because a massive flood had killed three-quarters of the tributes in the Thirty-Eighth Arena.

Five's victory was no such fluke.

On the nights when Ben needs a reminder that he’s not the worst person in the room, he rewatches Five’s Games. He watches the Victor with the highest kill count in this room, the Victor who took out ten tributes in his Games.

Very few people remember what Five’s name was before the Games. Caesar Flickerman and the Gamemakers nicknamed him that when he took out the entire Career Pack on his second day in the Arena, when he snuck past the Pack and to the Cornucopia (to this day, no one is entirely sure how), disabled the mines, replanted them around the Careers’ camp, and set them to explode when touched.

By the end of Five's Games, he'd taken out five more tributes by a combination of leftover mines and other rewiring of Arena parts. Tiny little Five, from District Three- he's the coldest killer out of any of them.

And yet, he and Ben get along. Five gripes and snarks about the black coffee they serve in the Mentor's room, and he's one of only two people- the other Klaus- who can get Ben to laugh while he's in the Capitol.

Ben knows about Five's friend back home, the girl named Delores that Five talks about just enough to keep her alive but never enough to have Dave's fate happen to her. Five mentions her sometimes in interviews, never by name, as a sign that he's still human, that being a Victor hasn't destroyed him, and the Peacekeepers don't touch her.

Allison isn't the only Victor who has people she cares about back home, people that she has to keep alive so that they don't go the way of Dave. Five, deep under his killer exterior and fake smiles and wicked genius, is just as scared and human as the rest of them.

-

Vanya’s the newest Mentor, the victor of the Seventy-Third Hunger Games. Her Arena had been divided into two temperature zones- frozen tundra outside of a tiny ring around the Cornucopia, and livable temps around the Cornucopia itself. A tiny little thing from District Five, she’d won by figuring out how to diverge the power supply keeping the area around the Cornucopia warm to a singular spot, where she'd stayed and hidden until everyone else had died. (Since she didn't directly kill them, they're not considered her kills, but no one can be entirely sure if every death in her games that wasn't part of the Bloodbath can't be indirectly attributed to her. If they count indirect kills, she's about tied with Five, but as she didn't directly kill anyone like Five did with his bombs, she doesn't feel like as much of a killer as the small boy does.)

“Does it ever get easier?” Vanya whispers as they’re grabbing food after the Seventy-Fourth Games, where her girl Tria nearly lived but died from those fucking berries, and Ben doesn’t have the heart to lie. When you’re a Mentor, when you have to sit through these Games and send the children to their deaths, you know that hope is fruitless.

"The nightmares get easier," Ben says, giving her an apologetic smile, and she swallows and nods.

"Okay," Vanya says, and all Ben wants to do is hug her. He doesn't, though. They're Mentors and sooner or later, they have to get used to the pain. There's really no way out of the constant cycle of Games and tribute sacrifices and deaths. 

-

Diego’s one of Ben’s oldest not-quite friends. A Victor from District Ten, he’d gone into the Games knowing how to kill an animal. He’d been raised by the slaughterhouse, his job before becoming a tribute being the person who slit the throats of the cows himself before they ended up being passed on for butchering.

During Games, Diego’s never been the Mentor from Ten to go to the Sponsors. He’s always the one coordinating the distribution of the gifts, eyes peeled for a way to alert his tributes as to ways to succeed in the Arena.

But it never works. District Ten hasn't produced a Victor since Diego's Games- the Sixty Third. District Ten is more the District of the slaughtered than the slaughterers, their tributes more wide-eyed farm animal than predator.

Ben thinks that Diego takes the deaths the hardest, though he doesn’t show really show it during the Games. Afterwards, though- Ben has found Diego crying multiple times before, his stutter bursting into full bloom as another one of his tributes fails to survive. 

-

Luther, from Two, is the most traditional looking Mentor that Ben has gotten to know. No one would have doubted that Luther, a Career from District Two, would have ended up as Victor. And the bets were right- he was a brawler with a talent for heavy weaponry that had been placed into an Arena that had rained metal spikes at night, spikes that he could collect during the day and use as weapons.

When he went back to his District after the Games, Luther adopted a cat. Named it Crest.

(No one could have missed the symbolism. Crest's the girl from Four who died by his side in the Games, the girl he'd been in an alliance with before she'd been taken out by one of the rains of metal when accidentally slipping in the mud outside their cave and landing at the bottom of a ravine.)

Luther's cats keep dying. He keeps naming them after the tributes of his Games and the tributes he's lost, the ones from his own District that never make it out of the Arena. Reep. Krish. Lae. Prita. Caib. Rayle. Lily. Heather. Turnip. All down the line, after the cats keep dying in the same kind of "accidents" that Dave died in, Luther keeps naming those damn pets.

All the other Mentors Ben knows try never to get attached. Luther, on the other hand, doesn't forget a single name. Luther's got all their names memorized- all of those who died because of him, whether because he was the survivor of his Games or because he failed to get them a win as their mentor. 

Luther destroyed so many people in the Arena, but he does care, and he shows it in this small, insignificant way.

-

And then there’s Ben himself. Ben, who’s been here the longest, Ben, who’s watched more tributes die under his watch than any other of his not-quite-friends in the Mentor circle, Ben. Ben, who killed his own best friend in the games by feeding her nightlock berries. 

Ben, who has watches Klaus get turned into the Capitol’s whore and Allison get her hopes up for every tribute and Diego cry as the screens for the Games went black and Luther come back with a few more dead cats under his name and Vanya become hardened to death and Five become an alocholic at age fifteen as yet another tribute of his dies.

Ben, who has watched as only a single tribute of his ever survived. Klaus, by the time the Quarter Quell starts to roll around, is the only tribute Ben has ever carried through to victory.

No one ever expects his District to win, and for the most part, they don’t. Ben’s Mentor, Leila, had been the Victor of the Seventh Hunger Games and had committed suicide only a month after Ben had won the Fifty-Eighth. Ben had been their only mentor until Klaus had won the Sixty-Ninth Games and bumped them up to two.

On his worst nights- the nights after the Games, when Klaus goes home with a Capitolite to satisfy what he’d promised them in exchange for a doomed Sponsorship, when Ben has watched yet another set of tributes die pointless deaths- he pulls up the footage from his own Games.

He watches himself as he hides for most of the Games before he's flushed out of his hiding spot by a fire. He ended up killing three people, one by accident, one by those damn berries, and one with his bare hands. He'd been desperate and feverish in the last few nights of the Games that he barely even remembers what the final showdown had been like.

He watches it now, though. He watches as he strangles that girl from Three, unrealizing her knife stabbed into his shin. He'd been so far gone with fever and adrenaline that he hadn't even realized what was happening, but he had still killed her.

Ben is friends with a group of killers, but none of them are worse than himself. He is a monster just as much as they are, a man who has killed to survive.

-

The Third Quarter Quell arrives, and Ben knows. He knows better than he knows the scar on that back of his left hand, better than he knows Allison's design signatures or Five's favorite brand of alcohol or the clients that like Klaus best or Luther's cats' names or how many knives Diego carries or Vanya's trembling whisper. He knows who is probably going in.

He's going in. Klaus is going in. Diego's going in. Vanya's going in. There aren't enough Victors from their Districts for their names not to be chosen.

Five is most likely, due to the fact that Three has two surviving female Victors and no other Males.

Luther and Allison are the only two that have a chance of not making it, but Ben knows them. He knows that they'll volunteer, that they won't be able to bear not going in. Luther's been dealing with survivor's guilt for years, and Allison's daughter's life is on the line.

When the Names are Reaped, when they find themselves alongside Finnick and Mags and Katniss and Haymitch and Chaff and Seeder, Ben knows. 

Only one of them can win. 

They're all killers, but only one of them can survive, now.

 

(Or maybe not.

Five's a genius, even through the alcohol- he knows too. He can see the way the cards will fall, knows who is likely to win this game of proven killers. Ben knows it won't be himself who wins, and probably not Klaus either, but he has the feeling that Five can see  _exactly_ who has a chance and who's likely to win. 

On a train with the cameras wired to play a loop of Five and Ben sleeping, they exchange a few words on their way to the Capitol.

"We can fix this," Five says, eyes dark but clear of any alcohol. He's as dangerous as he was three years ago, for his first Games, and Ben knows that Five's being completely honest.

"We can decide who wins. We can decide who becomes the Victor, how the outcome of the Games falls."

"How?" Ben asks, and Five grins, a President-Hargreeves-predator-like smile that sends chills down Ben's spine.

And Five, the killer, the boy who turned the Arena against itself, asks, "What do you know about District 13?")

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys all liked this! It's a lot different than my usual Umbrella Academy fare, but I hope I still managed to characterize everyone well and that you enjoyed it. If you liked it, feel free to leave a kudos/comment, with as much constructive criticism as you want to share. Comments are always appreciated, as short or as rambling as you'd like to make it! Comments are the lifeblood of the writer, after all.


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